Mommy's Gold Star

Is it wrong that I'm just a teensy little bit happy that Elli has been diagnosed with an ear infection??

Jeremy was out of town for the first three days this week, and little Miss Elli was pretty upset about the whole "not having Dadda" here thing, which I was chalking up to her being aware of her surroundings and a Daddy's girl. But then I started noticing that she was pulling on her right ear. No problem .... she's working on her canine teeth on the right side, so I thought it was just referred pain up the jawline. And while she was hot at times, she wasn't running a fever, so it was probably just teething.

Yesterday, we went to the Doctors to get Elli's flu shot, and before we left, she not only took a morning nap (for like the first time in months), but also had a 30 second bout of whining / shuddering / poking at her ear. And I thought, "Well, we'll see if I can ask the doctor to just look in her ear while we're there." That was a no-go, so then I had to figure out if I should schedule an appointment just to come in and get the ear looked at when (a) Elli was rapid-cycling her moods of being out-of-sorts (easily attributed to Daddy being away) and being a happy-go-lucky-bordering-on-slap-happy little child, (b) there was no fever, (c) Jeremy would have to take a break in his morning to bring her to the office, and (d) she was teething, and the last time we went in for a suspected ear infection, it was just teething pain.

I reluctantly scheduled the appointment, and told Jeremy that he'd have to take her in. This was followed an ongoing conversation throughout the night about how we should only take her in if we thought she was really ill and how I was probably just over-reacting, and how if she didn't have an ear infection then Jeremy was going to say she had to be running a fever before we went in the next time. (While Jeremy held it together nicely and didn't actually SAY anything cranky about the going-to-the-doctor plan, there was definitely an undertone of sighing and shaking the head.)

But.... Guess who has an ear infection?

Mommy's intuition was right!

(Now if I can just convince him that it's worth the extra 3 mile drive and $1 to get the prescription filled at Target with their nifty syringe-friendly bottles and better medicine flavoring, we'd really be in business...)